‘Club Kid’ Scene-Stealer Kirby Howell-Baptiste on Playing a Drugged-Up Party Girl Who Turns Jordan Firstman’s World Upside Down: She’s ‘A Complete Tornado’

It’s a line said, in various forms, numerous times across the first half of “Club Kid,” Jordan Firstman‘s hedonistic and heartfelt coming-of-age comedy drama about a hard-partying New York club promoter suddenly forced to grapple with life and responsibilities. But the most hilariously-timed utterance comes in the middle of a crucial scene — one that shifts the entire movie — and from and by a minor, yet unforgettably wild, character.

“She’s a massive party girl — she never sleeps, she only parties,” says Brit actor Kirby Howell-Baptiste of how Edison was described to her. “She’s completely lost all social boundaries. The lifetime of drugs melted half of her brain away, and all her social cues and etiquette have gone.”

Howell-Baptiste’s etiquette-free Edison is only in “Club Kid” for a few minutes, but manages to steal the crucial scene in question from under the nose of writer, director and lead star Firstman.

Roughly quarter of the way into the film, she rocks up unannounced and chaotic, sporting green braids and oversized sunglasses, at the apartment lived in by Firstman’s nightclub promoter Peter (Firstman), with 10-year-old Arlo (Reggie Absolom) in tow. While wandering around the place like it’s her own, she reveals — in a hysterically matter-of-fact manner — that not only is Arlo his, but she’s brought the kid across from the U.K. to live with him permanently. Boom.

But Peter is gay — and confidently declares that he’s never slept with a woman. Not true, Edison asserts as she casually roams the kitchen on the hunt for literally anything remotely looking like drugs she can swallow or snort. He had sex with her friend Leonine a decade earlier at one of his nights while so high on ketamine, cocaine, GHB and (probably) more that he didn’t have a clue what was going on.

“Nah, you fucked her, babes,” Edison says. “Point is, that’s your son.”

Tragically, Leonine — as her apparent friend explains while sniffing some white powder she found on the counter — struggled with mental health issues (“She was in and out of the loony bin… what do you call it, rehab?”) and recently ended her life. “Last week she goes and tops herself — she fucking killed herself, babe.”

In the midst of making these life-changing and upsetting revelations in the most wonderfully insensitive manner possible, Edison inquires if Peter and her should “do a bump” of coke (slightly shaken by how his life is quickly unravelling, he declines).

“[Edison] is just a complete tornado,” says Londoner Howell-Baptiste, adding that she thinks the character is an “amalgamation of a few party people” Firstman has encountered. “But what I really love is that, although she’s absolutely bananas, she does feel quite real and quite relatable. I think everyone knows that person, to some degree. At some point in your life, you have met that person.”

Edison isn’t seen again in “Club Kid” after the apartment scene, in which she eventually leaves Arlo in Peter’s care and — predictably — fails to return to collect him as promised later on. But as Peter begins a frantic search to find her across various New York house parties, further levels of her comically debauched behaviour come to light, as he hears how she was kicked out of several places for simply being too much of a tornado to handle.

“I wasn’t part of those scenes, obviously, but what was really cool was that you got more of a picture of Edison,” she says. “Even in her absence, you got more of a picture of what she was doing and how she was just belligerently running around New York, hoovering up drugs at everyone’s party.”

Howell-Baptiste admits she had no idea who Firstman was when she was originally invited to audition for “Club Kid” in mid 2025. As someone who’s “not really on social media much” she missed his breakout during the COVID-19 pandemic. But she checked out some of his Instagram videos and thought he was funny. Crucially, the casting was being done by Carmen Cuba, who she says has “really exquisite taste” and thought, while she hadn’t seen the full script, the role seemed fun — “and the character was a party girl and I felt like I could channel that pretty well.”

A few months later, shooting in New York, Howell-Baptiste still didn’t have a full picture of what “Club Kid” was all about (she admits to only watching it in September), but her main takeaway was that Edison was written by someone “who knows how to party.”

While the scene they shot was “almost verbatim” from the audition, there was a bit of ad-libbing, with Howell-Baptiste being the one who added the British slang term “tops herself.”

“And afterwards, everyone was like, ‘What do you you mean ‘”tops herself”?’ Because, obviously, we’re in a film that’s written by a gay man. There’s so much about it that celebrates queer culture, and topping has a completely different meaning there,” she says. Despite offering to remove the word, she was told to keep it in. “It made the cut — and it think it’s really fun and adds even more confusion when it comes to American audiences being like: ‘What is going on with this girl?'”

In terms of notes from Firstman, she says the main discussion was how he wanted Edison’s voice to sound, with the request that — alongside the British accent — she was “very hoarse, like she’s been up all night and almost always lost her voice.”

To achieve this, Howell-Baptiste channelled former Spice Girl Mel B. “She always had this slight hoarseness singing that I always thought was very cool, so that’s where my mind went,” she says.

Having shot her key scene (and the even shorter scene in which Edison and Leonine first meet Peter in the club) in the fall of 2025, Howell-Baptiste — whose long line of credits include “Killing Eve,” “Barry” and “Hacks” — moved on to other acting jobs. Several months later, while filming Season 3 of British TV drama “Sherwood,” Firstman messaged her to tell her that “Club Kid” had been accepted into Cannes. “I was like, ‘How incredible,’ but that was sort of it for me for a very long time.”

Of course, “Club Kid” wound up being the talk of the festival festival, the breakout hit that sparked an intense bidding war eventually won by A24 for the princely sum of $17 million. Howell-Baptiste was oblivious to it all (“I joke that I live under a rock”) until her manager messaged her saying “Are you aware of everything that’s going on with ‘Club Kid’ in Cannes?” Keeping with the theme, it was a makeup artist who later informed her that “Club Kid” was going to Toronto. “I just wasn’t aware of any of the buzz!”

Thankfully, Howell-Baptiste was able to attend the premiere at the BFI London Film Festival and took to the stage at the Royal Festival Hall with Firstman and Absolom, staying to watch the film to experience the laughs, cheers and tears from a hugely enthusiastic audience. Now, she can finally enjoy having a crucial — and spectacularly funny — role in one of the standout movies of the year.

“I filmed in a complete vacuum — I just did one scene with three other characters and filmed the party scene, which was just one night,” she says. “So it’s all come as a really pleasant surprise to me — it’s lovely.”